Adam Holland, PhD, is a technical assistance specialist at the UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG). His research interests include motivation in early childhood, promoting cognitive development in young children, equity, and understanding the effects of classroom processes on children's social and emotional competence.

As part of our FPG profile series, we recently spoke with Holland to learn more about his work at FPG. Here’s what he had to say.

Tell us a bit about your professional journey―and what brought you to FPG?

My original background is in k-6 education. I received my degree in elementary education from Wake Forest University and taught elementary school in Raleigh, NC, for a number of years before returning to UNC Chapel Hill to pursue my master’s degree in education with an emphasis on early childhood, intervention, and family support.  

With the encouragement of my advisor, Kate Gallagher, I returned to UNC to pursue a PhD in education, with an eye toward improving the systems that connect early childhood and elementary education. Thanks to a fellowship from UNC, I was able to spend my first year in the program exploring opportunities in this area and connected with the FirstSchool project at FPG in 2009. The project, guided by phenomenal individuals like Sharon Ritchie, Gisele Crawford, Dick Clifford, Diane Early, and Iheoma Iruka, so intrigued me that I renounced my fellowship and accepted a position as a graduate research assistant.  

FirstSchool was focused on uniting the best of early childhood, elementary education, and special education with a particular focus on improving experiences for underserved populations. I spent the rest of my time in the doctoral program working on this project, deepening my understanding of how classroom processes affect children’s development as well as beginning to understand the disjointed systems that create a difficult transition for many children as they move from childcare to formal schooling.  

Since then, I have been fortunate enough to remain on projects at FPG that seek to improve children’s experiences as part of families and classrooms. These projects have included serving as director of the North Carolina Early Learning Network, chair of the International Early Childhood Inclusion Institute, and now as an implementation specialist on The Impact Center at FPG's Triple P Support team, the Build Up team, and the STEM Innovation for Inclusion in Early Education (STEMIE) Center.  

What do you do at FPG—describe your job, walk us through a typical day, and tell us about the projects you're currently working on.

I currently work on three projects that focus on implementation and technical assistance to improve the lives of young children and their families. On the US Department of Education-funded STEMIE, I focus on understanding how children develop STEM knowledge and skills from birth to age five. This gives me the opportunity to work directly in classrooms to engage children in STEM activities. I work regularly with a wonderful cohort of center directors as we try to better understand what kind of intensive technical assistance it takes to make our STEM ideas a reality in classrooms around the country.  

I also work on two teams that are part of The Impact Center at FPG, focusing on implementation support. The first is the Build Up team, where I support North Carolina’s Child Behavioral Health Team, a part of the Division of Child and Family Wellbeing (DCFW) at the NC Department of Health and Human Services. I collaborate with individuals around the state to design and implement system frameworks to address needs ranging from trauma-informed and resiliency workforce development to creating a more efficient state system to address infant and early childhood mental health.  

The second team at The Impact Center supports the state’s scale-up of the evidence-based Triple P Parenting Program. As part of this work, I partner with amazing community implementation teams around the state as they scale up and maintain Triple P in their local contexts.  

What do you like most about your job?

I love solving problems. Whether it’s working with a teacher trying to figure out how to address challenging behavior in the classroom or a state leader trying to figure out how to design a system that serves children and families in need, these issues are problems to address. Figuring out how we navigate the limitations of our existing infrastructure while still doing what’s best for kids, caregivers, teachers, and those who support them is never boring and always pushes me to find the best in myself and the best in others. There is nothing more gratifying than working with other passionate people to overcome barriers and seeing the fruits of our labors benefit those most in need.

What do you find most challenging?

As I mentioned earlier, I love solving problems—but in this field, many problems do not come with neat solutions. It can be disheartening to work for years on defining a system only to have funding fall through at the last minute or a key partner shift their focus. Working with the resources we have often leaves much to be desired in what we can do to address issues in the real world. Sometimes, all the passion and desire for improvement among all the partners in the work cannot shift certain immovable challenges. I suspect that I will never get used to this sort of dissatisfaction, but it helps to focus on the wins we do get, even if those wins are not without their own challenges and barriers.  

How does your work further the mission of FPG?

At its core, FPG’s mission is about moving research into practice. Throughout my time here, I have been privileged to have access to the most cutting edge research and innovations while being able to work directly with those best placed to put them into practice. Implementation support and technical assistance are all about the questions of how we change things in a way that that remains sustainable and yields the greatest benefits for children and families. Whether that means changing classroom practice to be more inclusive and rigorous or systems to better implement evidence-based innovations like Triple P, each of my projects allows me to work daily to move the best of our knowledge at the University into systems that will allow it to make real impacts throughout the state of North Carolina and the world.

What do you hope to have accomplished five years from now?

It’s always hard to envision the future. Things can and do change so much that five years from now feels like an uncertain thing. I suppose that I would say that my hope for the future is more of the past. My career, which spans 25 years, thus far has been punctuated not by huge wins but rather by slow, steady progress. Five years from now, I hope that I am helping more educators and caregivers navigate challenging behavior and helping more agencies design systems that allow those educators and caregivers (along with the children in their spaces) to flourish.  

You have a book coming out in September, can you tell us about it and what inspired you to write it?

My upcoming book, Thinking Outside the Prize Box: Navigating Challenging Behaviors in Today’s Classrooms, has its seeds in my own struggles as a child. I spent a lot of time in the corner, struggling to make sense of what I had done that caused teachers to yell at me. Unfortunately, when I started my own teaching career, many of the same (ineffective) tactics those teachers had used to try to shape my behavior ended up in my own teaching toolbox. Fortunately, though, I found incredible mentors who started me down a different path. 

As I grew in experience in the classroom, I started approaching classroom management differently, moving from a focus on short-term outcomes to long-term success, driven by connection with and respect for the children in my care. As I worked on my PhD, I came to better understand why this approach worked, which unlocked even more techniques and ways of navigating the sorts of behaviors that traditionally drive us nuts as adults. I have been blessed since leaving the classroom to have the opportunity to work with thousands of teachers around the country, providing training and coaching as part of short- and long-term projects. 

These experiences have further refined the techniques I originally developed in my own teaching practice as I have seen what does and doesn’t work for others. This is the place from which Thinking Outside the Prize Box comes. It’s a collection of everything I have learned to date about how we help children become the best that they can be in a way that preserves our own sanity in a field where stress and challenge are commonplace. These concepts are illustrated with practical stories and humor throughout in a way that I hope makes this an enjoyable and engaging read for anyone who picks it up.